I think it's good to consider ways in which Nix's UX could be improved.

But I'd draw an analogy to vim or emacs. These have steep difficulty curves to them, but provide a power-user experience. Roughly, Nix is to apt-get what vim is to notepad. -- It'd be weird to try vim but live in insert mode the whole time.

It's not a matter of "no-the-ux-doesn't-suck", but more "if you can get past the rough edges, the things which Nix allows are wonderful".

Speaking of vim vs emacs, how does the nix command line interface compare to GNU Guix?

Guix greatly simplifies things. Like others said for Nix, I really would recommend managing things declaratively in your system config and a manifest file, but the basic cli isn't bad.

guix install ranger

guix remove ranger

guix pull

guix upgrade

guix search ranger

These basics just work how you'd expect last I checked. There is some `guix shell` stuff as well, but I don't use it, so won't be able to say much about it.

See the refcard for an overview on the Guix CLI: https://guix.gnu.org/guix-refcard.pdf

What is terrible about explicitly specifying the source of the package definition? Seems like a dramatic conclusion to make based on a minor detail of the command line syntax.